Description
Book SynopsisTrade ReviewA 2020 Seminary Co-op Notable Book
"GerShun Avilez highlights the impact of injury's threat to Black queer life through the diaspora. . . . These writers negotiate risk in order to express desire, intimacy, and the potential for freedom. . . . A brilliantly researched and clearly written book. . . . A model of what scholarship should be in this contemporary moment." --
GLQ"
Black Queer Freedom is an outstanding work of literary and cultural criticism, and exemplary of the riches to be had in black queer studies. It illuminates how space—be it the street, the prison, the hospital, or the place of labor—mediates our injury and our desire. The black queer subject, what Avilez calls 'the injury-bound subject,' is shaped by spatial injury and vulnerability and also enlivened by desire. Avilez explores how black queer artists articulate the erotic imperative of spatial justice, offering artistic address that exceed legal redress available for black queer people. Considering a wide array of genres—poetry, fiction, memoir, ethnography, oral history, and portraiture—and traversing a wide terrain—Canada, Jamaica, South Africa, United Kingdom, and United States—Avilez shows the capaciousness of black queer life and art and indeed guides us to reach higher ground where freedom is possible."—Dagmawi Woubshet, author of
The Calendar of Loss: Race, Sexuality, and Mourning in the Early Era of AIDS"With pristine writing and bold thinking about queer desire, gender, and spatial justice, Avilez's
Black Queer Freedom is a timely addition to the growing body of scholarship on black vulnerability, trauma, and queerness. Avilez dynamically illustrates how gender non-conforming artists are important to challenging the boundaries of black freedom."—LaMonda Horton-Stallings, author of
Funk the Erotic: Transaesthetics and Black Sexual CulturesTable of ContentsAcknowledgments
Introduction: Freedom in Restriction
Part One. Threatened Bodies in Motion
Chapter 1. Movement in Black: Queer Bodies and the Desire for Spatial Justice
Chapter 2. Geographies of Mobility: Migratory Subjects and the Uncertainty of Itineracy
Part Two. Bodies in Spaces of Injury
Chapter 3. Uneven Vulnerability: Queer Hypervisibility and Spaces of Imprisonment
Chapter 4. The Shadow of Institutions: Medical Diagnosis and the Elusive Queer Body
Conclusion: Lives of Constraint, Paths to Freedom
Notes
Index
